Steps for a Smooth Website Rebrand With Your Marketing and Design Team

Performing a website Rebrand was the primary objective of online advertisers this year, accounting for 42 percent of digital ad spending, eMarketer estimated.

In the consumer packaged goods and consumer products industry, this number rose to 65 percent. Branding also counted for over half of digital ad spending in the media and entertainment industry.

Branding is clearly essential to successful marketing in today’s online environment, and rebranding company websites has become a priority for many businesses. But in order to rebrand your website successfully, it’s vital to make sure your marketing and design team has a few key items at its disposal.
 

Document Your Brand Promise

 
Owner of positioning firm Strategies, Tara Stoutenborough says the first step toward developing a branding identity is defining your brand promise.

• What do you want people to think of when they think of your brand?
• What feelings do you want them to associate with your brand?
• What expectations do you want them to have when interacting with you?
• What should set you apart from the competition in their mind?

Get members of your company who interact with customers to help your marketing team verbalize answers to these questions. Then make sure that the answers you come up with are documented in a form that’s accessible to your marketing and web design teams.

Your marketing and web design personnel need to know what your brand promise is to make sure that it gets faithfully expressed on your website and communicated to your customers.
 

Distribute Your Brand Identity Style Guide

 
Your marketing and web design teams need to know what your branding policies are. The best way to ensure this is to create and distribute a brand identity style guide.

A brand identity style guide documents how key branding elements of your marketing campaign should be handled.

This include:

• Logos
• Fonts
• Typography
• Colors
• Images
• Textual elements such as preferred language
• Stylistic elements such as the voice of your corporate persona

Create a brand identity style guide, upload it to a place team members can access it, and make sure team members are trained to consult it.
 

Make Your Marketing Materials Accessible

 
In addition to knowing how branding elements should be handled, your web design and marketing teams also need to have easy access to marketing materials that implement your brand policies. An ideal way to provide your team with such access is to use a digital asset management (DAM) tool to build a virtual library of graphics images, videos, documents and other files relevant to your marketing campaign.

Make sure your team has access to your DAM library by storing it on a cloud server. To help you select a cloud provider, Top 10 Cloud Storage provides reviews of leading cloud service options. Your team can then select elements from your virtual library to display on your website.
 

Preserve Your SEO

 
When doing a website rebrand, tread carefully so you don’t lose any search engine optimization benefits you’ve previously gained.

This is particularly important if you’ll be moving your site to a new domain. But whether you’ll be using the same domain or not, your web design and SEO teams should be on the same page about what on-page search engine optimization elements you’re trying to preserve, such as which title tags and keywords are important to each page.

To maintain your SEO rankings when moving domains, Bonafide marketing agency president Shareef Defrawi outlines a ten-step approach your web team can follow.

Essentially, this involves benchmarking your key performance indicators and then temporarily blocking your site from search engines while your prepare your redirects from your old site to your new one.